UFOs & Alien Contact: Two Centuries of Mystery

Bartholomew, Robert E., & Howard, George S.

An Australian sociologist (Bartholomew) and a Notre Dame psychologist (Howard) have written a social history of UFO sightings/abductions, concentrating on the 19th and 20th centuries. Their analyses are based primarily on newspaper accounts. They begin with a rash of phantom airships, including encounters, and point out similarities with waves of UFO and flying saucer sightings. They progress through ghost balloons, airship hoaxes, a British UFO prank, phantom German air raids, Swedish ghost rockets, flying saucers, to a chapter on UFOs as a collective delusion: "exaggerated beliefs that gain credibility within a particular social and cultural context" (p. 215). Whereas Part I dealt with sightings, Part II is on "Strange Experiences: Real or Fantasized." They prefer to think of UFO abductees/contactees "as fantasy prone rather than as severely disturbed individuals" (p. 276). Appendix A is a valuable chronology of annotated cases titled "A Chronological Listing of Over Two Hundred Cases of Reported Communication Between Aliens and Humans" (p. 285).